Rating: 8.9/10

Recommended Tracks: Romance, Something Came Over Me, Future Crimes

RiYL: Sleater-Kinney, Quasi, Helium

It would be criminally lazy to take Wild Flag’s debut album and pigeonhole it as just another step forward in female-oriented rock, in part because that would devalue the great strides made by female musicians in the past twenty years, but also because the album is so much more than that. In an era where the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is still dominated by male artists, and where talented guitar virtuosos like Marnie Stern are praised for sex appeal above technical prowess, it’s all-too tempting to put Wild Flag on a feminist pedestal (hanging tough somewhere in-between Bikini Kill and Ani DiFranco). While music critics lag behind with gender hang-ups (and the woeful cliché of “oh-look-women-can-play-instruments-too”), the female artists at the forefront are smashing the dynamic by making it no longer relevant.

With the first cry of “Shake, Shimmy, Shake!” on Wild Flag’s opening track, “Romance,” it becomes clear that these ladies, each member no stranger to hard rock, are their own movement. Hand claps and vocal harmonies, punctuated by the spot-on rhythmic drumming of Janet Weiss, take the album to a soaring high of foot-stomping bliss. Frontwoman Brownstein’s deep voice shifts from mellow and soothing in “Glass Tambourine” to sporadic gasping in “Endless Talk”, while never losing the sense of urgency that builds up and grabs the listener by the seat of their pants.

Wild Flag is a rallying cry, but for what, exactly, is yet to be determined. Brownstein’s line, “I’m so hard-wired to be alone” in “Future Crimes,” changes from a lament to a discordant assertion of independence with each consecutive listen, and the album’s frantic pace could either be wild energy or a determined force.

Hopefully after an album like this, the descriptive term “all-female band” will fade away into irrelevancy. Goodness knows, it should have happened a long time ago.